For a few weeks now, I have found my soul troubled by a small riddle: What is the “soft right”? Who is the soft right? Has anyone ever said, “I am on the soft right”?
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It is possible, albeit with some difficulty, to understand what is meant by “the right” in the Israeli context. It has little in common with the traditional right. In Israel, “right” is crude, racist ultranationalism.
So where did this “soft right” come from, suddenly? Could it be that a different sort of right has emerged here, right under our noses? A right that is willing to stop the settlement enterprise, but peacefully? To withdraw from the West Bank, but with tears in their eyes? To separate religion from state, with a broken heart? To enact into law, with groans of pain, full equal rights?
If this is indeed what the soft right is, then it deserves to be congratulated for its welcome entry to the circles of the “hard left.” But if the softness of the soft right adds up to nothing more than loathing for Benjamin Netanyahu, then it’s best to stop scrambling everyone’s brains. Loathing for Netanyahu is certainly a just and worthy attribute.
His displacement is also absolutely essential to introducing a degree of normalcy to the state. But profound revulsion to the man – particularly when diluted by a downplayed willingness to join his government – does not indicate softening of any kind. It’s the same banal, predictable right.
What has, in fact, softened slightly? The language. The melody. The table manners. Nothing in the right-wing script has been softened or subtracted. It was just hidden a little. But you still need a microscope to identify material differences between Ayelet Shaked and Itamar Ben-Gvir; a micrometer to measure the distance between Gideon Sa’ar and Yariv Levin; a political forensic laboratory to find significant daylight between Benny Gantz and Yoav Gallant, between Yair Lapid and Avigdor Lieberman, between Gideon Sa’ar and Yoaz Hendel. They are all still David Amsalem, – lawmaker and Netanyahu's loyalist – but some of them click their tongues, nod in disapproval and wipe the foam from the corners of their mouths with a pristine handkerchief.
When I encountered the term “soft right” for the first time, I immediately recalled a lovely story from the days when it was prohibited to meet with members of the Palestinian Authority. Despite the ban, certain courageous journalists traveled abroad for such meetings.
One of them, Danny Rubinstein – one of the great experts on the Middle East and a former Arab affairs analyst for Haaretz, related that at one of these gatherings, during a coffee break between sessions, a Palestinian participant came up to him and hit him with a pointed question: “Tell me, are you a Zionist?” Slightly disconcerted, Danny replied: “I am a Zionist, but I am a moderate Zionist.” The Palestinians all burst out laughing. Danny was confused by their response, until the Palestinian who had asked the question bent over him and said: “I am a terrorist, but a moderate terrorist.” And it was exactly the same laugh that I laughed when I heard the term “soft right.”
The actual expression is presumably a journalistic invention. Ostensibly, the startling discovery of a new slice of the Israeli electorate; in practice, just another catchy, usable oxymoron, like “smart TV,” or “Jewish democracy.”
But in the interest of balance and fairness, it should be said that the term “center-right” is no less of a vacuous, ridiculous oxymoron.
And as I continued to laugh, I suddenly had a genuinely Archimedean “Eureka!” moment. I found the soft right. According to all of the signs, manners, beliefs, ideas and expressions, the center-left, and with it also the new National Unity Party, are in fact the soft right. And so, their real name should be: the soft-national-center-left-right.
But how could so many letters fit on a single ballot slip?
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